Comments by "roidroid" (@roidroid) on "TED-Ed" channel.

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  12. vanarcken113 Sadly what i said is indeed true.  Algae farming (& biofuels in general) and solar power are competing interests of mine, a few years back i was closely following a fair few algae projects (as my old videos attest to), and i still occasionally tinker with algae-tech ideas to this day. Algae is the fastest growing plant on the planet, it's the best, but photosynthesis isn't particularly efficient compared to man-made tech.  It's great for producing liquid fuels though (ie: for vehicles), very simple.  That's why there's so much buzz about algae, exciting stuff.  But everything has it's limitations.  It's more than just great for fuel, but also for food, and even carbon sequestration.  This stuff has a lot of uses, but it doesn't do everything. If you search for Algae Thermodynamics there's a fair few articles which will catch you up. But as a quick explanation: Think of how much land is required to produce X amount of biofuel for combustion cars (wikipedia has some good biofuel yeild numbers, algae is the best).  Then compare to the same land-area covered in solar panels charging electric cars.  It's almost no comparison, the electric cars come out way in front, mostly because the thermodynamic limitations of photosynthesis just can't be routed around :(.  You can easily charge your own electric car from the solar panels on your roof, but to grow enough biofuel to fuel your own car takes a relatively gigantic amount of land (i'd have to dig through my old notes to give you the exact land-size required), the yields are super low.
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  17. +Troy Milton one way is that they can first have an number of ideas of how it might work, and then they devise relevant experiments to test the ideas individually. For instance, they can introduce a specially shaped molecule* which they imagine should block or interact with one of the processes. If it has absolutely no effect on the cell in an experiment, then it would heavily imply that their ideas on how that process works were wrong. They can keep doing this until they find things which do have effects, then they analyse all of these things to build up a picture of what could (or definitely couldn't) be happening inside the cell. Over many experiments and testing of ideas, the picture becomes clearer. It's sortof like being in the dark, trying to figure out what an object is by repeatedly poking it with a stick from different angles, and keeping notes of when you hit something and when you don't. It can take a while, but over time this data paints an increasingly clear picture of the shape of what you're poking. It's like a game of connect the dots, each experiment gives you more dots, and marks some other places as "definitely no dots here". Every time they do an experiment and get more dots, and more "no dots here" areas (i think i'll call these "anti-dots"), they then can have another round of brainstorming to try to figure out what the picture could be. They take the best ideas from this brainstorming, and then devise new experiments to test the ideas, ie: "if this idea is correct, then there MUST be dots right around here and here." Even if the experiment fails to reveal dots there, it will instead reveal a "no dots here" area, and this data will still add to their picture. So even if an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, it's still a win win situation. I guess the boardgame of "Battleship" is another which can be used as a metaphor. Each single shot you take gives you very little data, but over time it builds an increasingly clearer picture of things you couldn't previously see. It only takes a very little experiment, repeated slightly differently time & time again, to build up great amounts of knowledge. *Thesedays we have such a huge amount of knowledge about chemistry, that we use computer simulations to model what we know. This makes it easy to find new things we can experiment with, because it's sortof like "the computer simulation shows that the shape of this molecule should effect this thing", and then we test it in the real world to see if it's true. Remember all the poking with a stick we've previously done, by now we have a really good idea of the shape of various things, we even have a whole bag of specially shaped poking sticks to speed up the process. Thesedays we're super confident about the shape of most things, we only really poke specific areas we're not sure about.
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